


Strong and Weak

by moodorbs



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, listen. theyre gay. theyre so gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:47:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26953120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodorbs/pseuds/moodorbs
Summary: Two drabbles, one from Maya's perspective and one from Mallory's. Mallory's is written in second-person, and takes place when they're teens. Maya's takes place when they first meet as 11 year olds.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character





	1. Weak

When she's with her, Maya feels focused for once. Like her mind is quiet, fisheye lensed just to Mallory, trying to track every single thing about her. The way she moves, slow and careful and still somehow making it look like she owns the ground she steps on, could crumble anything she touches to dust. How her hair shines in the sunlight, tiny filaments letting the summer light through. How when she laughs, her mouth is wider than anyone's has a right to be and her eyes seem to flicker back and forth between shades of grey.

Maya wants to know everything about her.

She's got a folder for Mallory, just like she does for everyone at camp: estimated height and weight, hair color, birthday, likes and dislikes. But this one is larger than the others.

She knows that she doesn't really have a food preference, but she tends to err on the side of larger portions. Knows how when she talks about her latest project, her eyes light up and she smiles and it's real. There's lists of what Mallory knows about her chosen field, of steps to make a prosthetic nose or a gaping wound as realistic as possible. (Maya remembers the looks she got parading into the mess hall with an eye hanging from a socket. The bumping into tables unable to have depth perception was worth it for the look on everyone's faces.)

And still...it seems like she knows nothing, compared to the others at camp. She's got everyone else pinned down to a T: aggressive because of their lack of parental support. Deliriously needy for affection, and willing to do anything to get it. Distancing themself so they don't hurt anyone else.

People are easy for her to intellectualize, to turn over and over in her head like a figurine, to see the inner workings of. Mallory...Mallory not so much. If the others are an open book, Mallory is in the restricted section of the library, past doors and vaults and locks and keys and mean librarians who say John Glatt is "too mature for an eleven year old". All she has to go off of is the description from the card catalogue and a photo of the book itself.

Maya is determined to learn more. She has to.


	2. Strong

She's so strong. Stronger than you will ever be. You caved, kept caving, hurt others with the shattered pieces of yourself when you should have withstood the pressure.

She has, and beautifully.

You were there when she came down off her high, the one she never asked for: trembling, twitching, crying into your arms, shaking so hard you thought she would break apart beneath your hands.

She didn't. She didn't even crack. She stayed whole, has stayed whole throughout all of this. Even at the height of her misery, what she described as her brain being shrouded in fog and buried deep in the earth, she still shone through. Her smile didn't change, even when she was hurting, just the intensity at which it shone.

You wish you had an ounce of the strength she did to stand up, to say she didn't want whatever was happening to her, to keep gobbling pills like Pac-Man, being touted to doctor after doctor and poked and prodded and *normalized*.

Sometimes she asks you, late at night, if she should be sorry for how she is. How when she gets excited she shakes, bouncing on her heels, hands aflutter. How she can't control her volume, it must hurt your ears to listen to. How her interests are strange, stranger than yours.

You kiss her forehead and tell her you wouldn't want her any other way.

How you're so jealous of the way she can express herself, make her emotions known. How she blurts out whatever's on her mind, not going through six or seven filters of manipulation and coercion and careful planning before it hits the ears of its recipient. How no matter what she's thinking about you love to hear her talk, to go over case files with her, to wrap your arms around her as she yells at procedurals on the television that aren't doing forensics right. Even the gorier aspects--you know more about decomposition than you'd ever want to now, can pinpoint the day botflies arrive, have vivid recollections of corpses in various stages of decay from photos you saw swiping through her phone from cold cases she'd been working on.

You tell her that and more, over and over and over again. And you marvel at how she chose you--someone shattered, broken beyond repair, and spent the time to glue your pieces back together.

The very least you can do is love her back.


End file.
